UK lacks ‘credible plan’ to drive net zero transition, Lords report warns

“There is no point planning a carbon-free energy future if you haven’t got a clue how you will get there or how it will be paid for”

March 4, 2022



The UK will miss its net zero carbon targets because the government has failed to introduce “credible plans” to drive investment in key alternative technologies, such as heat pumps, a parliamentary report has warned.

Ministers have not yet explained how the transition will be funded or what policies and financial incentives they will use to deliver on their targets to reduce emissions, the study by the House of Lords industry and regulators committee said. Britain has committed to decarbonise the power grid by the mid-2030s and reaching net zero carbon emissions overall by 2050.

“There is no point planning a carbon-free energy future if you haven’t got a clue how you will get there or how it will be paid for,” said Lord Clive Hollick, the Labour peer who chairs the committee.

The report urged the government to review its opposition to the use of state borrowing, warning that the amount that can realistically be raised via surcharges on energy bills would not be enough to pay for the net zero transition.

Piling costs on to energy bills would also put unfair pressure on consumers already bearing the brunt of soaring energy prices and would fall disproportionally on low-income groups, the committee said.

The government’s proposed funding model to pay for new nuclear power stations, known as the regulated asset base model, which imposes levies on household bills from the moment construction starts would only add to impending cost of energy, the report warned.

“Bills are regressive as the poor pay more of their income on energy costs . . . the government should look again at using greater public borrowing to fund what are huge and long-term infrastructure costs,” it said.

The Climate Change Committee, the government’s environmental adviser, has estimated it would cost £50bn annually from 2030 to meet the cost of the transition to net zero.

Ministers must resolve key issues such as how to incentivise households to replace gas boilers with heat pumps and what the plans are for the 6mn homes where heat pumps may be unsuitable, the report said.

The committee also called for measures that would aid the net zero target to be explicitly added to Ofgem’s statutory duties. However, it concluded that the energy regulator should not be given a more strategic role in planning the transition.

Instead, to deliver the changes, a transformation task force should be established within the Cabinet Office and report to the prime minister. It should co-ordinate all departments and set out a clear road map for the implementation of energy policies, the report recommended.

It also added to the criticism of Ofgem for its poor oversight of the energy market, after a spike in gas prices led to the collapse of at least 29 suppliers. The report said Ofgem’s failures had “created greater cost and uncertainty for consumers.”

The report urged the regulator to adapt the price controls it applies to energy companies to ensure that they can invest in new infrastructure before it is needed.

Ofgem said it had “played a key role in driving down carbon emissions over the last 20 years” and would continue to work with the government to meet the net zero targets.

The government said: “We will meet the net zero target by 2050 and are on track to do so. Detailed measures are set out in our comprehensive Net Zero Strategy, which has been widely welcomed by a range of experts, including the independent Climate Change Committee.”

Source: Financial Times

UK’s energy overhaul must confront abject failures on efficiency
March 3, 2022



In the aftermath of the 1973 oil price shock, governments around the world scrutinised energy in a new light. Many put resources into the development of wind turbine technology and other emerging energy sources.

The UK created its first Department of Energy. It instituted a new focus on efficiency, urging consumers to “switch off”, and started an Industrial Energy Thrift Scheme to gather data on energy use and provide advice on making savings.

This should be another such moment — a “wake-up call to move away from rogue regimes and towards new technology”, says former Gazprom trader Adi Imsirovic, now at the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is prompting a rapid rethink of energy policies around Europe. Soaring wholesale gas prices, now 10 times their level a year ago, could send UK households’ energy bills towards £3,000 a year when the new price cap is set for October.

In a week that a UN report warned of a “brief but rapidly closing” window to adapt to climate change, those considerations push in the same direction as net-zero policies: towards more renewable energy, greater efforts to decarbonise households and industry, and enhanced energy efficiency. The latter shouldn’t be an afterthought in policy — but generally is.

Business and energy secretary Kwasi Kwarteng last week focused on supply when talking UK energy security. He argued that the UK needed more cheap renewables, to invest in new nuclear energy and to back North Sea production. The latter, he rightly noted, does little to affect the international market prices to which the UK is exposed.

Nor does shale gas, which even if it could overcome significant geological uncertainty and public scepticism (unlikely) would require many years and thousands of wells to make a meaningful contribution. Efficiency, which can reduce fossil-fuel use and save household budgets fastest, was just Kwarteng’s postscript: he noted the government was spending £6.6bn on upgrades this parliament.

Those programmes are targeted predominantly on social housing and public buildings. They are entirely inadequate: Element Energy reckons that closer to £5bn a year is needed over the next decade to get the UK’s ageing, leaky housing stock ready for low-carbon heating technology such as heat pumps.

Deadlines to stop installing gas boilers in new homes, and to stop replacing existing ones, are arguably too distant. But insulating UK houses is a prerequisite for whatever comes next, and makes good sense in the meantime.

Yet there is no mass-market effort to retrofit the UK’s homes, where 63 per cent of houses can be brought up to standard for less than £1,000 on Element’s figures. And domestic heating accounted for nearly 40 per cent of UK gas demand in 2020.

This area is marked out by repeated, miserable policy failure. Since a shift in regulatory requirements under the coalition government, annual efficiency installations have fallen 90 per cent, according to the Resolution Foundation.

CONSERVATIVE POLICIES AUSTERITY ECONOMICS

The Cameron government’s Green Deal, a complex and uncompetitive financing arrangement, aimed to insulate 14m homes by 2020 but issued only 14,000 loans. The decision in 2013 to cut “the green crap”, as David Cameron was reported to have said and which included tighter standards for home energy efficiency, was costing households £2.5bn annually and rising, CarbonBrief reckoned earlier this year.

The latest embarrassment to effective policy was the 2020 Green Homes Grant, an administrative nightmare that managed 47,500 upgrades compared with a 600,000 target.

One problem has been an aversion to allocating public money towards schemes — something that will be needed to help the poorest owner-occupiers who are most squeezed by rising energy prices and tend to live in less efficient properties. But repeated policy changes and dwindling activity have also just gutted the skills and supply chain for this type of work. And, says Rebecca Teasdale at Baringa, even those who can afford it need to be helped by “making the process simple — ideally via a one-stop shop”.

The bombardment of Ukraine and the isolation of Russia means that energy prices are likely to remain high. Concerns about security, climate change and the cost of living crisis are pointing in the same direction. Addressing persistent failure on efficiency should be an urgent part of the answer.

helen.thomas@ft.com
@helentbiz
Source: Financial Times

HETERONORMATIVE MALE VIOLENCE IN DRAG

Moon Witch, Spider King — Marlon James continues his Dark Star saga
March 3, 2022


In 2015, Marlon James won the Man Booker Prize for his novel A Brief History of Seven Killings, a historical fiction about the attempted assassination of Bob Marley in 1976.

His subsequent swerve into the fantasy genre with the publication in 2019 of Black Leopard, Red Wolf, the first instalment of his Dark Star trilogy, was unexpected but won him legions of new fans. Although the book’s dizzying, circuitous plot left many perplexed, the attention it garnered served to demonstrate that the conventional divide between literary and genre fiction is a moot point.

With Moon Witch, Spider King, the second volume of his African fantasy saga, James opts for a more linear, less digressive structure, and cements his status as a wildly inventive and lyrical storyteller.

Like an ancient African Lisbeth Salander, Sogolon dedicates her lonesomeness to meting out lethal rough justice to men who harm women

When James first announced the Dark Star trilogy, he called it an “African Game of Thrones”. He later recanted, saying the description was a joke. While that throwaway line might help orient the story, along with Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings and Stan Lee’s The X-Men, there’s no doubt that these are Marlon James novels. The setting is a pre-colonial, iron-age Africa in which memory is slippery and unreliable narrators obfuscate the truth. It’s a theme that is emphasised by the repeated refrain in Moon Witch: “here is truth”. Misdirection and dissimulation are the trilogy’s narrative sleight of hand; the intended result is that each instalment tells the story from the perspective of a different protagonist and they can be read in any order.

In Black Leopard, Tracker, a bounty hunter with a preternatural ability to trail anyone by scent, tells an unseen inquisitor his fragmented version of the quest to find a mysterious boy, who may or may not be heir to the North Kingdom. Included in Tracker’s motley crew of travelling companions is his antagonist, Sogolon, the 177-year-old Moon Witch. She stands out among the female characters, many of whom are little more than witches, whores and pawns in a game of political one-upmanship — and who find themselves on the receiving end of much of James’s trademark violence.

In this second instalment, Sogolon offers her own take on the story, and with it a compelling riposte to accusations that James only writes misogynistic characters. Moon Witch is no less violent than Black Leopard but, seen from Sogolon’s point of view, the violence mostly feels like a legitimate function of storytelling — and a further subversion of the fantasy genre’s stereotypically heteronormative and Eurocentric tropes.

There’s a lot more to Moon Witch than just Sogolon’s version of the premise on which the first novel hangs, and she has her own dubious motivations for joining the search. This second volume is both a bildungsroman and a thriller that begins more than 150 years before the events of the first volume. In fact, Sogolon’s story doesn’t intersect with Tracker’s until about 100 pages before the end of this 656-page book. We meet our anti-heroine when she is a “no name” little girl, consigned to live in a termite hill by three older brothers who blame her for their mother’s death in childbirth. It’s the bleak beginning to a hard-knock life, but the doggedness that is the defining trait of her personality — and also her Achilles heel — is there early on: “And if toe fall off, she will run on heel, and if heel fall off, she will run on knee and if knee fall off she will crawl.”

When Sogolon manages to escape, her latent magical powers — which she calls “wind (not wind)” — are revealed when she inadvertently kills a man trying to rape her. It’s the start of an epic odyssey, backgrounded by generations-long tensions and wars between the avaricious kings in Fasisi, the capital of the North Kingdom, and the mad kings of Wakadishu, the South Kingdom’s central city.

Always underestimated, Sogolon is variously a thief, rape victim, a fight-club competitor, the common-law wife of a shape-shifting lion, a mother, a prisoner, a recluse among gorillas and monkeys, a bounty hunter and eventually the Moon Witch. Like an ancient African Lisbeth Salander, she dedicates her lonesomeness to meting out lethal rough justice to men who harm women. Sogolon maintains, “man is doing what they feel they must do, and woman is making do”. But over the decades, her spiky, wilful, bloodthirsty tenacity often works to her detriment and to the advantage of her nemesis, the Aesi, chancellor to one of the northern kings.

As gripping as the novel is, it’s a long and tough read. Sometimes it even feels confrontational: the author’s frequent knowing refrain is “let us make this quick”. James’s story is a dense, sprawling phantasmagoria made even more labyrinthine by his stream-of-consciousness idiosyncrasies and sudden time leaps. It’s a confident writer who uses African words and phrases without the need for exposition and sustains a diction that mimics the present-tense grammatical syntax of many west African languages.

But Moon Witch rewards a reader’s perseverance and makes you wonder exactly who’ll play fast and loose with the truth in the final instalment, if you have the stomach and staying power to seek it out.

Moon Witch, Spider King by Marlon James, Hamish Hamilton £20/Penguin Publishing Group $30, 656 pages

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Source: Financial Times

How London and the US became safe havens for dirty money
March 3, 2022

Dawn over the City of London © Evening Standard / eyevine

When Liz Truss recently stood up in parliament to announce a “hit list of oligarchs” the UK foreign secretary said that she wanted “a situation where they cannot access their funds, their trade cannot flow, their ships cannot dock and their planes cannot land”. Her speech, along with others from the floor of the House of Commons slamming oligarchs and their associates, was just one prominent example of how Vladimir Putin’s savage attack on Ukraine has brutally brought to the fore the phenomenon known as “Londongrad”.

The warm home the British establishment and its financial system provide for dirty money from the post-Soviet sphere and elsewhere may finally begin to be seen as the embarrassment — and worse — that it constitutes. Take Dmitry Firtash, exposed in 2006 as the part-owner of the company handling Russia’s Ukrainian gas shipments which long gave Moscow a stranglehold over Kyiv. After he spent money lavishly on everything from luxury houses to Cambridge scholarships and political donations, Firtash’s UK social status seemed to have no limits — he was feted by parliamentarians and shook hands with the Duke of Edinburgh — until he was arrested in Austria on an FBI indictment for corruption.

Much excellent reporting in the past decade has revealed how corrupt elites from around the world launder looted money in the west. Yet the focus has been on the looting as much as on the laundering. The hows and whys of rich countries’ transformation into autocrats’ handmaids — or in Oliver Bullough’s powerful metaphor, butlers — have not received the attention they deserve. A number of new books have set out to change that — and their timing, sadly, could not be better, as tightening sanctions on Putin’s cronies becomes a weapon of choice in the west’s pushback against his aggression.

In Butler to the World, Bullough takes the UK to task. Jeeves, the unflappable butler of PG Wodehouse’s Bertie Wooster series, much loved by thousands of British and Anglophile readers, may not be an obvious angle of attack. But Bullough’s aim is sharp: “As written by Wodehouse it’s jolly funny, but [if] you focus on Jeeves’s actions rather than on his smooth-talking, soft-shoed manner, you end up with something extremely dark: a mercenary, a fixer-for-hire.” And that is just what, Bullough explains, Britain has become in its willingness to service all comers as long as they pay enough.

Bullough takes his metaphors seriously, to the point of enrolling in a school for actual butlers (he was kicked out after flower decoration class, once he was rumbled as a money-laundering researcher). Butlering goes far beyond accepting deposits from the world’s corrupt: it extends to procuring (palatial) housing for them, educating their children, honouring them in every way from naming rights at Britain’s world-class universities to royal patronage, as well as catering to all the minor needs the super-rich might need.

All this started, in Bullough’s highly readable account, with Britain’s disastrous military adventurism in Suez in 1956, when it joined France and Israel to try to dislodge Egypt’s nationalisation of the canal. This ended in humiliation when US opposition exposed British strategic postwar impotence. His thesis is that after strategic withdrawal, “butlering” became the answer to US secretary of state Dean Acheson’s challenge that Britain had “lost an empire, but not yet found a role”. The role would be to facilitate money flows around the world, no questions asked.

Several factors came together to make this happen. Bullough describes a postwar City of London determined to insulate itself from government regulation, ready to embrace innovations that would mean good business for financiers. He also highlights how in a world of hard currency shortage — withholding dollars was the means by which Washington made London give up Suez — there was a lot to like in allowing cross-border money flows that escaped national regulation. For Bullough, whose earlier book Moneyland explored corruption in the global financial system, the midcentury emergence of the eurodollar system of offshore dollar transfers and of Britain’s butlering role are two sides of the same dirty coin.



Then there was the imperial wind-down. “If Westminster was the head of the British empire,” Bullough writes, “the City [of London] was its heart, pumping money out into financial arteries that stretched to every continent and every city on earth.” In Bullough’s telling, “butlering” came to the rescue of British finance. Butler to the World bulges with stories of how past or remaining outposts of the empire, from the British Virgin Islands to Gibraltar, reinvented themselves as places to secrete away money or escape onerous rules.

American Kleptocracy, by corruption researcher Casey Michel, gives the US the same treatment as Bullough gives the UK. Reading the two together makes one a little sceptical of Bullough’s thesis that the UK is uniquely depraved in catering to dirty money. As Michel shows, some of the world’s deepest tax havens are US states, including not just Delaware (inventor of the shell company, according to the author) but also Nevada, South Dakota and Wyoming.

Like Bullough, Michel masterfully recounts the tragicomic outcomes when outré autocrats meet serviceable financial and legal systems — such as the “dictator bling” of Teodoro Nguema Obiang Mangue, son of Equatorial Guinea’s detestable president and notorious for his dozens of luxury cars and boats, friendships with US pop stars, and magpie-like collection of Michael Jackson memorabilia.

Michel gives Washington a more mixed assessment than the state governments — which in this context is a relative compliment. But Washington, too, is guilty of leaving too many loopholes in otherwise decent anti-money laundering laws for a number of transactions and professions, most notoriously real estate. Just one example from Michel’s book: in “Trump SoHo . . . the New York construct most closely affiliated with the entire Trump family . . . a staggering 77 per cent of unit sales went to buyers who fit money laundering profiles”.



These two books will leave no reader in any doubt that the US and the UK have a large class of “enablers”, or service providers such as bankers, lawyers, real estate agents, accountants and PR advisers needed to give dirty money a good home. That term gives the title to another book in this genre, Enablers, where the international financier class is taken to task by Frank Vogl, a former economic journalist and communications adviser to financial institutions who laments what has become of the professions he has spent a lifetime working for.

The US enabling class may be the most dangerous, given its influence in the politics of a more powerful country. But the US has successful heroes in Michel’s account. They range from the late senator Carl Levin, who attached anti-money laundering provisions to the Patriot Act after 9/11, to the dogged investigators who traced Obiang’s money and a justice department unit for confiscating kleptocrats’ assets. More recently, a bipartisan congressional vote banned anonymous shell companies last year, and the Biden administration has committed itself to an anti-corruption agenda.


Old peculiarities of British law, from Scottish limited partnerships to private criminal prosecutions, became perfect instruments for crooks to hide their money and silence their critics



Bullough’s heroes, in contrast, are few and far between, and much less powerful than Michel’s: backbenchers without the staffing US legislators enjoy, or underresourced regulators. Bullough makes a good case that there is something particularly conducive to “butlering” in Britain’s peculiar set-up. The country’s unwritten social codes; its upper class’s exclusive solidarity and unspoken obsession with money; the common law tradition and resistance to codified rules — all conspire to frustrate crackdowns or even the willingness to crack down.

In Britain’s financial elite, “chaps don’t tell other chaps how to behave,” writes the author. And so old peculiarities of British law, from Scottish limited partnerships to private criminal prosecutions, became perfect instruments for crooks to hide their money and silence their critics.

Bullough and Michel both deserve praise for going beyond moralising and pointing out how an industry geared to enabling the corrupt is not just unsavoury but can hurt a country’s real economic prospects. In his account Michel shows how derelict factories in America’s rust belt bizarrely became conduits for laundering dirty money. Twenty-something investors from an orthodox Jewish community in Miami would turn up, bereft of industrial or corporate experience but flush with cash which US authorities say derived from Ukrainian corruption. They would pay over the odds for metal plants and buildings in backwater communities desperate for outside investment.

But these communities languished as the new owners proved indifferent to development; all they needed was the safety and discretion offered by obscure US land and property holdings.

The attack on Ukraine shows America’s and Britain’s enabling industries (though they are not alone) are plainly international security risks. It is mind-numbing that it should take war in Europe to make politicians aware of this. All the more credit to writers who keep lifting the veil on the unseemly parts of the financial services industry and urging us all not to avert our eyes. There are signs governments are being galvanised into ending their addiction to dirty money inflows.

Upon reading these books, you realise that we still fall far short of this, despite current sanctions. This reader, at least, will not believe things have changed until he sees it.

Butler to the World: How Britain Became the Servant of Tycoons, Tax Dodgers, Kleptocrats and Criminals by Oliver Bullough, Profile, £20, 288 pages

American Kleptocracy: How the US Created the World’s Greatest Money Laundering Scheme in History by Casey Michel, St Martin’s Press, $29.99/ Scribe UK, £18.99, 368 pages

The Enablers: How the West Supports Kleptocrats and Corruption — Endangering Our Democracy by Frank Vogl, Rowman & Littlefield, $32/£25, 216 pages

Martin Sandbu is the FT’s European economics commentator

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Source: Financial Times

Fact and Mythmaking Blend in Ukraine's Information War

Stuart A. Thompson and Davey Alba
Thu, March 3, 2022, 

A quiet embankment along the Dnieper River in Kyiv, as Russia's invasion of Ukraine began on the morning of Thursday, Feb. 24, 2022. (Brendan Hoffman/The New York Times).

Just days into the Russian invasion of Ukraine, a pilot with a mysterious nickname was quickly becoming the conflict’s first wartime hero. Named the Ghost of Kyiv, the ace fighter had apparently single-handedly shot down several Russian fighter jets.

The story was shared by the official Ukraine Twitter account Feb. 27 in a thrilling montage video set to thumping music, showing the fighter swooping through the Ukrainian skies as enemy planes exploded around him. The Security Service of Ukraine, the country’s main security agency, also relayed the tale on its official Telegram channel, which has over 700,000 subscribers.

The story of a single pilot beating the superior Russian air force found wide appeal online, thanks to the official Ukraine accounts and many others. Videos of the so-called Ghost of Kyiv had more than 9.3 million views on Twitter, and the pilot was mentioned in thousands of Facebook groups reaching up to 717 million followers. On YouTube, videos promoting the Ukrainian fighter collected 6.5 million views, while TikTok videos with the hashtag #ghostofkyiv reached 200 million views.

There was just one problem: The Ghost of Kyiv may be a myth.

While there are reports of some Russian planes getting destroyed in combat, there is no information linking them to a single Ukrainian pilot. One of the first videos that went viral, which was included in the montage shared by the official Ukraine Twitter account, was actually a computer rendering from a combat flight simulator originally uploaded by a YouTube user with just 3,000 subscribers. And a photo supposedly confirming the fighter’s existence, shared by a former president of Ukraine, Petro Poroshenko, was from a 2019 Twitter post by the Ukrainian defense ministry.

           IT'S BEEN DONE BEFORE

During the summer of 1914 in a crucial battle in Mons Belgium British troops claimed to have seen St. George and a group of Longbowmen in the skies, which they claimed to have turned the battle in their favour.

This is known as the Legend of Mons, and occult horror author Arthur Machen claimed at the time that it was based on his short story called the Bowman which had been published in the popular press of the day. However historian A.J.P Taylor believed the story and recorded it in his history of WWI.

The fact that the tale and trench rumours of Angels of Mons appeared the summer before may have had a subconcious effect on the soldiers in the trenches facing the first industrialized war of mass murder. 

          LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment: WWI Xmas Mutiny (plawiuk.blogspot.com)

When fact-checking website Snopes published an article debunking the video, some social media users pushed back.

“Why can’t we just let people believe some things?” one Twitter user replied. “If the Russians believe it, it brings fear. If the Ukrainians believe it, it gives them hope.”

In the information war over the invasion of Ukraine, some of the country’s official accounts have pushed stories with questionable veracity, spreading anecdotes, gripping on-the-ground accounts and even some unverified information that was later proved false, in a rapid jumble of fact and myth.

The claims by Ukraine do not compare to the falsehoods being spread by Russia, like laying the groundwork for a “false flag” operation in the lead-up to the invasion, which the Biden administration sought to derail. As the invasion neared, Russia falsely claimed that it was responding to Ukrainian aggression and liberating citizens from fascists and neo-Nazis. And since the assault began, Russia made baseless claims that Ukrainians had indiscriminately bombed hospitals and killed civilians.

Instead, Ukraine’s online propaganda is largely focused on its heroes and martyrs, characters that help dramatize tales of Ukrainian fortitude and Russian aggression.

But the Ukrainian claims on social media have also raised thorny questions about how false and unproven content should be handled during war — when lives are at stake and a Western ally is fighting for its survival against a powerful invading force.

“Ukraine is involved in pretty classic propaganda,” said Laura Edelson, a computer scientist studying misinformation at New York University. “They are telling stories that support their narrative. Sometimes false information is making its way in there, too, and more of it is getting through because of the overall environment.”

Anecdotes detailing Ukrainian bravery or Russian brutality are crucial to the country’s war plan, according to experts, and they are part of established war doctrine that values winning not just individual skirmishes but also the hearts and minds of citizens and international observers.

That is especially important during this conflict, as Ukrainians try to keep morale high among the fighters and marshal global support for their cause.

“If Ukraine had no messages of the righteousness of its cause, the popularity of its cause, the valor of its heroes, the suffering of its populace, then it would lose,” said Peter W. Singer, a strategist and senior fellow at New America, a think tank in Washington. “Not just the information war, but it would lose the overall war.”

In previous wars, combatants would try to sabotage enemy communication and limit the spread of wartime propaganda, even cutting physical communication lines like telegraph cables. But there are fewer such cables in the internet age, so in addition to downing communication towers and disrupting pockets of internet access, the modern strategy also involves flooding the internet with viral messages that drown out opposing narratives.

That digital battle moved at startling speed, experts noted, using an array of social media accounts, official websites and news conferences streamed online to spread Ukraine’s message.

“You have to have the message that goes the most viral,” Singer said.

That was the case with another report from Ukraine involving a remarkable confrontation on Snake Island, an outpost in the Black Sea. According to an audio recording released by Pravda, a Ukrainian newspaper, and later verified by Ukraine officials, 13 border guards were offered a frightening ultimatum by an advancing Russian military unit: surrender or face an attack. The Ukrainians responded instead with an expletive, before apparently being killed.

Audio of the exchange went viral on social media, and the clip posted Feb. 24 by Pravda received more than 3.5 million views on YouTube. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine personally announced the deaths in a video, saying they would each be awarded the title Hero of Ukraine.

But just days later, Ukrainian officials confirmed in a Facebook post that the men were still alive, taken prisoner by Russian forces.

Social media has become the main conduit for pushing the information, verified or not, giving tech companies a role in the information war too. The fake Ghost of Kyiv video, for instance, was flagged as “out of context” by Twitter, but the montage posted to Ukraine’s official Twitter account received no such flag. The false photo posted by Poroshenko, the former Ukrainian president, also had no flag.

While Twitter monitors its service for harmful content, including manipulated or mislabeled videos, it said that tweets simply mentioning the Ghost of Kyiv do not violate its rules.

“When we identify content and accounts that violate the Twitter Rules, we’ll take enforcement action,” the company said.

In exercising discretion over how unverified or false content is moderated, social media companies have decided to “pick a side,” according to Alex Stamos, director of the Stanford Internet Observatory and a former head of security at Facebook.

“I think this demonstrates the limits of ‘fact-checking’ in a fast-moving battle with real lives at stake,” Stamos said. He added that technology platforms never created rules against misinformation overall, instead targeting specific behaviors, actors and content.

That leaves the truth behind some wartime narratives, like an apparent assassination plot against Zelenskyy or simply the number of troops killed in battle, fairly elusive, even as official accounts and news media share the information.

Those narratives have continued as the war marches on, revealing the contours of an information war aimed not just at Western audiences but also Russian citizens. At the United Nations on Monday, the Ukrainian ambassador, Sergiy Kyslytsya, shared a series of text messages that he said were retrieved from the phone of dead Russian soldier.

“Mama, I’m in Ukraine. There is a real war raging here. I’m afraid,” the Russian soldier apparently wrote, according to Kyslytsya’s account, which he read in Russian. The tale seemed to evoke a narrative advanced by officials and shared extensively on social media that Russian soldiers are poorly trained, too young and don’t want to be fighting their Ukrainian neighbors. “We are bombing all of the cities together, even targeting civilians.”

The story, whether true or not, appears tailor-made for Russian civilians — particularly parents fretting over the fate of their enlisted children, experts said.

“This is an age-old tactic that the Ukrainians are trying to use, and that is to draw the attention of the mothers and the families in Russia away from the more grandiose aims for war, onto, instead, the human costs of war,” said Ian Garner, a historian focusing on Russia who has followed Russian-language propaganda during the conflict. “We know that this is really effective.”

Official Ukrainian accounts have also uploaded dozens of videos purportedly showing Russian prisoners of war, some with bloody bandages covering their arms or face. In the videos, the prisoners are heard denouncing the invasion. The videos may raise questions about whether Ukraine is violating the Geneva Conventions, which has rules about sharing images of war prisoners.

Russia has also engaged in its own form of mythmaking, but experts say it has been far less effective. Rather than targeting international observers with emotional appeals, Russia has focused on swaying its own population to build support for the battle, according to Garner.

Since Russian state media is still calling the conflict a “special military operation” and not a war — in line with the description used by President Vladimir Putin of Russia — state broadcasters are left “trying to talk about a war that is apparently not happening,” Garner said.

The Russian government “can’t play to its strongest narratives of individual sacrifice,” he added, instead relying on stories of Ukrainians bombing hospitals and civilians, providing no evidence.

Ukraine’s efforts to amplify its own messages also leave little room for Russia to dominate the conversation, according to Singer, the strategist from New America.

“A key to information warfare in the age of social media is to recognize that the audience is both target of and participant in it,” Singer said. He added that social media users were “hopefully sharing out those messages, which makes them combatants of a sort as well.”

© 2022 The New York Times Company

Fire out at Ukraine's key nuclear plant amid Russian attacks





















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Ukraine Nuclear PlantThis image made from a video released by Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant shows bright flaring object landing in grounds of the nuclear plant in Enerhodar, Ukraine Friday, March 4, 2022. Russian forces shelled Europe’s largest nuclear plant early Friday, sparking a fire as they pressed their attack on a crucial energy-producing Ukrainian city and gained ground in their bid to cut off the country from the sea. 

(Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant via AP)

JIM HEINTZ, YURAS KARMANAU and MSTYSLAV CHERNOV
Thu, March 3, 2022

KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — A fire at Europe’s biggest nuclear plant ignited by Russian shelling has been extinguished, Ukrainian authorities said Friday, and Russian forces have taken control of the site.

Ukraine’s state nuclear regulator said that no changes in radiation levels have been recorded so far. It said staff are studying the site to check for other damage to the compartment of reactor No. 1 at the Zaporizhzhia plant in the city of Enerhodar.

The regulator noted in a statement on Facebook the importance of maintaining the ability to cool nuclear fuel, saying the loss of such ability could lead to an accident even worse than 1986 Chernobyl accident, the world’s worst nuclear disaster, or the 2011 Fukushima meltdowns in Japan. It also noted that there is a storage facility for spent nuclear fuel at the site, though there was no sign that facility was hit by shelling.

The shelling of the plant came as the Russian military pressed their attack on a crucial energy-producing Ukrainian city and gained ground in their bid to cut off the country from the sea. As the invasion entered its second week, another round of talks between Russia and Ukraine yielded a tentative agreement to set up safe corridors to evacuate citizens and deliver humanitarian aid.

Leading nuclear authorities were worried — but not panicked — about the damage to the power station. The assault, however, led to phone calls between Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and U.S. President Joe Biden and other world leaders. The U.S. Department of Energy activated its nuclear incident response team as a precaution.

Earlier, nuclear plant spokesman Andriy Tuz told Ukrainian television that shells fell directly on the facility and set fire to one of its six reactors. That reactor is under renovation and not operating, he said.

The Zaporizhzhia regional military administration said that measurements taken at 7 a.m. Friday (0500 GMT) showed radiation levels in the region “remain unchanged and do not endanger the lives and health of the population.”

The mayor of Enerhodar, Dmytro Orlov, announced on his Telegram channel Friday morning that “the fire at the (nuclear plant) has indeed been extinguished.” His office told The Associated Press that the information came from firefighters who were allowed onto the site overnight.

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson called for an emergency meeting of the U.N. Security Council in “coming hours” to raise the issue of Russia’s attack on the nuclear power plant, according to a statement from his office.

U.S. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm tweeted that the Zaporizhzhia plant’s reactors were protected by robust containment structures and were being safely shut down.

In an emotional speech in the middle of the night, Zelenskyy said he feared an explosion that would be “the end for everyone. The end for Europe. The evacuation of Europe.”

“Only urgent action by Europe can stop the Russian troops,” he said. “Do not allow the death of Europe from a catastrophe at a nuclear power station.”

But most experts saw nothing to indicate an impending disaster.

The International Atomic Energy Agency said the fire had not affected essential equipment and that Ukraine’s nuclear regulator reported no change in radiation levels. The American Nuclear Society concurred, saying that the latest radiation levels remained within natural background levels.

“The real threat to Ukrainian lives continues to be the violent invasion and bombing of their country,” the group said in a statement.

Orlov, the mayor of Enerhodar, said Russian shelling stopped a few hours before dawn, and residents of the city of more than 50,000 who had stayed in shelters overnight could return home. The city awoke with no heat, however, because the shelling damaged the city’s heating main, he said.

Prior to the shelling, the Ukrainian state atomic energy company reported that a Russian military column was heading toward the nuclear plant. Loud shots and rocket fire were heard late Thursday.

Later, a livestreamed security camera linked from the homepage of the Zaporizhzhia plant showed what appeared to be armored vehicles rolling into the facility’s parking lot and shining spotlights on the building where the camera was mounted.

Then there were what appeared to be muzzle flashes from vehicles, followed by nearly simultaneous explosions in surrounding buildings. Smoke rose into the frame and drifted away.

Vladimir Putin’s forces have brought their superior firepower to bear over the past few days, launching hundreds of missiles and artillery attacks on cities and other sites around the country and making significant gains in the south.

The Russians announced the capture of the southern city of Kherson, a vital Black Sea port of 280,000, and local Ukrainian officials confirmed the takeover of the government headquarters there, making it the first major city to fall since the invasion began a week ago.

A Russian airstrike on Thursday destroyed the power plant in Okhtyrka, leaving the city without heat or electricity, the head of the region said on Telegram. In the first days of the war, Russian troops attacked a military base in the city, located between Kharkiv and Kyiv, and officials said more than 70 Ukrainian soldiers were killed.

“We are trying to figure out how to get people out of the city urgently because in a day the apartment buildings will turn into a cold stone trap without water, light or electricity,” Dmytro Zhyvytskyy said.

Heavy fighting continued on the outskirts of another strategic port, Mariupol, on the Azov Sea. The battles have knocked out the city’s electricity, heat and water systems, as well as most phone service, officials said. Food deliveries to the city were also cut.

Associated Press video from the port city showed the assault lighting up the darkening sky above deserted streets and medical teams treating civilians, including a 16-year-old boy inside a clinic who could not be saved. The child was playing soccer when he was wounded in the shelling, according to his father, who cradled the boy’s head on the gurney and cried.


APTOPIX Germany

Many thousands of demonstrators walk down Willy-Brandt-Strasse, a main thoroughfare in Hamburg, Germany, carrying banners reading ""No more war"." and ""Another world is possible"." on Thursday, March 3, 2022. The Fridays for Future organization is taking to the streets around the world this Thursday to express solidarity with Ukraine and to protest Russia's attack on the country. (Daniel Reinhardt/dpa via AP)

Severing Ukraine’s access to the Black and Azov seas would deal a crippling blow to its economy and allow Russia to build a land corridor to Crimea, seized by Moscow in 2014.

Overall, the outnumbered, outgunned Ukrainians have put up stiff resistance, staving off the swift victory that Russia appeared to have expected. But a senior U.S. defense official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Russia’s seizure of Crimea gave it a logistical advantage in that part of the country, with shorter supply lines that smoothed the offensive there.

Ukrainian leaders called on the people to defend their homeland by cutting down trees, erecting barricades in the cities and attacking enemy columns from the rear. In recent days, authorities have issued weapons to civilians and taught them how to make Molotov cocktails.

“Total resistance. ... This is our Ukrainian trump card, and this is what we can do best in the world,” Oleksiy Arestovich, an aide to Zelenskyy, said in a video message, recalling guerrilla actions in Nazi-occupied Ukraine during World War II.

MAKHNOVIST BANNER 1917-1921 UKRAINE

Yemelyan Pugachev - Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yemelyan_Pugachev

Yemelyan Ivanovich Pugachev (Russian: Емелья́н Ива́нович Пугачёв; c. 1742 – 21 January [O.S. 10 January] 1775) was an ataman of the Yaik Cossacks who led a great popular insurrection during the reign of Catherine the Great. Pugachev claimed to be Catherine's late husband, Emperor Peter III.

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stenka_Razin

• Overview
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• Open rebellion
• Implications
• In Russian-language culture and folklore

The second round of talks between Ukrainian and Russian delegations was held in neighboring Belarus. But the two sides appeared far apart going into the meeting, and Putin warned Ukraine that it must quickly accept the Kremlin’s demand for its “demilitarization” and declare itself neutral, renouncing its bid to join NATO.

Putin told French President Emmanuel Macron he was determined to press on with his attack “until the end,” according to Macron’s office.

The two sides said that they tentatively agreed to allow cease-fires in areas designated safe corridors, and that they would seek to work out the necessary details quickly. A Zelenskyy adviser also said a third round of talks will be held early next week.

Despite a profusion of evidence of civilian casualties and destruction of property by the Russian military, Putin decried what he called an “anti-Russian disinformation campaign” and insisted that Moscow uses “only precision weapons to exclusively destroy military infrastructure.”

Putin claimed that the Russian military had already offered safe corridors for civilians to flee, but he asserted without evidence that Ukrainian “neo-Nazis” were preventing people from leaving and were using them as human shields.

The Pentagon set up a direct communication link to Russia’s Ministry of Defense earlier this week to avoid the possibility of a miscalculation sparking conflict between Moscow and Washington, according to a U.S. defense official who spoke on condition of anonymity because the link had not been announced.

___

Karmanau reported from Lviv, Ukraine. Chernov reported from Mariupol, Ukraine. Sergei Grits in Odesa, Ukraine; Francesca Ebel, Josef Federman and Andrew Drake in Kyiv; and other AP journalists from around the world contributed to this report.

___

Follow the AP’s coverage of the Ukraine crisis at https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine

What is Zaporizhzhya, Europe's largest nuclear power plant?

Michael Ruiz
Thu, March 3, 2022,
Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhya nuclear power plant, which has six reactors and supplies a quarter of the country’s electricity, is the largest facility of its kind in Europe and one of the biggest on the planet.

Russian forces attacked the plant early Friday morning local time, according to Ukrainian authorities, who warned that a meltdown there could be up to 10 times larger than the one in Chernobyl in 1986.

The bombardment sparked a fire, but authorities said radiation levels appeared normal, "essential" equipment had not been affected and that crews were addressing the damage.


The Zaporizhzhya nuclear power plant is pictured in the town of Enerhodar April 9, 2013. Reuters

RUSSIAN TROOPS SHELLING UKRAINE'S LARGEST NUCLEAR POWER PLANT SPARKING FIRE, OFFICIALS SAY

The plant is located in the town of Enerhodar near the Dnieper River in southern Ukraine. It’s one of four active nuclear facilities in Ukraine and accounts for six of the country’s 15 total reactors.

Zaporizhzhya’s reactors were commissioned between 1984 and 1995, according to its website. Construction on the first reactor began on April 1, 1980. The fifth was completed in 1989.

Officials added a sixth in 1995 after lifting a moratorium on further nuclear development.

It’s operated by Ukraine’s NNEGC Energoatom.

According to Power-Technology, an energy trade publication, the site was chosen because the surrounding land was unsuitable for agriculture and because of the site’s distance from other countries. The site also houses a spent-fuel storage facility underground.

In 2014, an apparent short-circuit at the facility led to some safety concerns, according to Reuters.

Local officials and the French nuclear safety watchdog IRSN later said they found no unusual radioactivity or danger to the public as a result.

The plant has an automated radiation monitoring system that posts real-time results on its website. The monitor was revamped in February 2021.

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CRITICAL RACE THEORY

'Incredible and tragic' story of America's largest free Black settlement comes to Pensacola


Kamal Morgan, Pensacola News Journal
Thu, March 3, 2022

Leading up to the Highlights in Black exhibition in December, museum manager Mike Thomin and Pensacola City Councilwoman Teniadé Broughton were figuring out which significant archaeological sites featuring Black history they should focus on next.

The fort at Prospect Bluff was the first to come to mind.

Following the War of 1812, Prospect Bluff held the largest free Black settlement in the United States. The new exhibit details how the maroons, or free Black people who escaped slavery, worked hard to protect their beacon of freedom and how the fort's destruction showed the commitment the U.S. government had to maintaining the institution of slavery.

"One of the reasons why this settlement was so feared was because it was enslavers' in the American South's worst nightmare," said Thomin, museum manager of the Florida Public Archaeology Network. "It was a free community of formerly enslaved people who had emancipated themselves and were literally fighting back to maintain their freedom."

The Florida Public Archaeology Network is presenting a new exhibit called "The Maroon Marines: Archaeology at Prospect Bluff." It details the battle at Prospect Bluff, which held the largest free Black settlement in what is now the United States.

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The Florida Public Archaeology Network, with support from Broughton, will hold an opening reception of the new temporary exhibit, "The Maroon Marines: Archaeology at Prospect Bluff," from 5:30 to 8:30 p.m. Friday at the Destination Archaeology Resource Center at 207 E. Main St. in Pensacola.

Broughton said she is thankful to sponsor and highlight events that have shaped Pensacola's history.

"Exhibit openings welcome guests to ask questions and offer their opinions in a casual setting. More so, exhibits give a moment to reflect, to actually sit with the artifacts and connect objects to the people who created them," Broughton said. "We don't know all of the names and personal thoughts of freedom seekers at Negro Fort. But the material culture that survives them sends a power message from the past that says, 'We were here and we died for our freedom.'"

Part of a moat that once surrounded the fort that stood at Prospect Bluff remains in the Apalachicola National Forest in this April 2019 file photo. After the War of 1812, Prospect Bluff held the largest free Black settlement in the United States.

The fort was constructed during the War of 1812 when the United States and British were at odds. The British decided in 1814 to open up a front in the Gulf South. They constructed Prospect Bluff, which was also called the British Post or Negro Fort by the Americans, along the Apalachicola River in what is now the Apalachicola National Forest.

It was mainly built by the Corps of Colonial Marines, which consisted of fugitive slaves and Creek tribesman who the British recruited. Because fugitive slaves did not want to go back into slavery and the Indigenous communities were resisting changes to their native lifestyles and encroachment onto their lands, some members of both groups were willing to side with the British against the Americans.

When the War of 1812 ended in 1815, the British left Florida and left the 300 African Americans and Indigenous people with all their weapons hoping they would defend themselves from the United States. The fort garnered a reputation as a beacon of freedom for escaped slaves as eventually 800 fugitive slaves from the Pensacola region, Tennessee, Georgia and Mississippi, came to settle in the surrounding areas.

Daniel Vasquez, an archaeologist with PaleoWest, digs out a layer of sediment April 17, 2019, from a test site as the U.S. Forest Service studies the land where the fort at Prospect Bluff was located. After the War of 1812, Prospect Bluff held the largest free Black settlement in the United States.

Escambia history: From 1821 to 2021: Creating a sense of place by linking the modern with the historic

"They didn't just hand these guys guns and they had to figure it out, they were highly trained Marines and there were hundreds of them," Thomin said of the fort's occupants. "And that guaranteed safety if you could get there and so that became, in the U.S. government's eyes and in slavers' eyes, a huge problem."

When Gen. Andrew Jackson heard about the fort, he came with the Army and Navy to destroy it. After a few skirmishes, Jackson ordered Maj. Gen. Edmund P. Gaines to destroy the fort. On July 27, 1816, Gaines fired a heated cannon ball to ignite gunpowder stored inside the fort.

The explosion killed over 270 men, women and children, and most survivors were executed or sent back into slavery. Those who did survive and escape went to Seminole towns nearby or to another free Black settlement called Angola in the vicinity of present-day Sarasota.

The Florida Public Archaeology Network is presenting a new exhibit called "The Maroon Marines: Archaeology at Prospect Bluff." It details the battle at Prospect Bluff, which held the largest free Black settlement in what is now the United States.

The upcoming Pensacola exhibit will feature many artifacts that were loaned by the U.S. Department of Agriculture National Forest Service. Some of these include brass straps that were probably from the exploded powder kegs that destroyed the fort in 1816, military items such as bayonets and ammunition and pottery fragments to showcase the daily life of people living in the fort.

Thomin and Broughton said they feel the exhibit demonstrates how Black and Indigenous history needs to also be told.

"The hope is that people, maybe if they're learning about it for the first time through the exhibit, that they'll then go and do more research and learn about it," Thomin said. "It's an amazing, incredible and tragic story, but it really shows the resilience and I think that's something that we can all really appreciate as human beings, is that resiliency."

For more information, visit the Destination Archaeology Resource Center's website at destinationarchaeology.org or its Facebook page.

This article originally appeared on Pensacola News Journal: Pensacola exhibit examines Prospect Bluff, large free Black settlement

‘I feel empty, scared’: Dubai-based Ukrainian expats share their ordeal amid invasion

People wait to board an evacuation train from Kyiv to Lviv at Kyiv central train station following Russia's invasion of Ukraine, in Kyiv, Ukraine March 1, 2022. (Reuters)

Tala Michel Issa, Al Arabiya English

Published: 03 March ,2022: 

Ukrainian expatriates living in the United Arab Emirates shared their fears and concerns about their family and friends who are still stuck in Ukraine since Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24.

Dubai-based Ukrainian expat Olga told Al Arabiya English that her life has not been the same since the start of the invasion.

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“I’m totally destroyed and frustrated,” the 33-year-old said. “This has been the worst week of my life. Me and my friends here in Dubai are trying to help in every possible way.”

Olga’s family members are from Kyiv and have decided to stay in the capital throughout the invasion to help with the situation however they can.

“My mom is volunteering and helping to weave the camouflage nets for our army and sorting the donated clothes that will be sent to the most affected regions,” she said, adding that her pregnant sister, however, fled Kyiv out of fear for her life.

“My family is in Western Ukraine. There have been some airstrikes there, but it is still a little bit safe than other regions. My sister is pregnant, so she made a decision to leave Kyiv after the first missile strikes hit the city,” Olga explained. “She said she had never been more scared in her life.”

Many residential buildings were destroyed in Kyiv, Olga said. Despite this, many of her friends refused to leave the city despite the critical situation.

A view shows an apartment building damaged by recent shelling in Kyiv, Ukraine February 26, 2022. (Reuters)

“The last time the city looked like this was probably after World War Two.”

‘I feel empty and scared’

Ukrainian expat and operations manager at a media firm in Dubai, Anna, 31, told Al Arabiya English that it has not been easy for her friends and family to reach the European border.

“We [Ukrainians] all know what is going on. This is not a ‘special operation,’ this is a real war,” said Anna. “The invasion has united all Ukrainians. We want to say to Putin that we don’t want his help on the territory of our independent country.”

Rescuers remove debris in the regional administration building, which city officials said was hit by a missile attack, in central Kharkiv, Ukraine, March 1, 2022. 

(File Photo: Reuters)

“I am from the east [of Ukraine] and for my family and friends, it has not been easy to reach the border with Europe. We are 1,300 kilometers away from the border with Europe. My father and brother can’t leave the country now, under the new update from the government,” she explained.

“I feel empty inside… and scared. I can’t help them,” she said. “Everything I wanted 10 days ago, I don’t want it anymore. All I want is for the Ukrainian people stuck in Ukraine to be safe.”

She continued, “One thing I can say for sure is that our people are very strong, and they hope that this will end tomorrow.”

There have been conflicting accounts about the number of civilian deaths in Ukraine since the start of the invasion. The country’s State Emergency service said on Wednesday that over 2,000 civilians have died because of the invasion, but the United Nations has cautioned that this number might be much higher.

“Ukraine is fully destroyed. I really don’t know what the future holds for my country, but I am sure we will win,” Anna said.

Dubai-based communications professional and Ukranian expat Maria S., 31, used to live in the Solimyanskii District, had lived abroad ever since she was 22.

A residential building right next to the school she used to go to has been bombed, she said, which is about a five minute walk from her home.

“My friends are there and my uncle, who is my closest relative.”

“I woke up on February 24 with a message from my friend at around 7 in the morning. She texted one word: it [the invasion] started," she explained. “Since then, I’ve gone through lots of phases, I guess. I couldn’t sleep for three days…I was crying.”

“I have some of my childhood friends who are volunteers in the [Ukrainian] army right now,” Maria S. said in an interview with Al Arabiya English. “Most of my friends have left the country, the majority of them are in Europe. In Poland and Germany.”
‘Crime against humanity’

Maria P., 32-year-old Dubai-based Ukrainian expat, told Al Arabiya English that her family has been hiding in shelters.

“It’s a war. My city Kharkiv is under attack. My family and friends are hiding in shelters,” she said, deeming the Russian invasion of Ukraine a “crime against humanity.”

A satellite image shows a damaged bridgeroad and nearby homes, in Chernihiv, Ukraine, February 28, 2022. (Reuters)

The northeastern city of Kharkiv, is the second-largest city and municipality in Ukraine and has long-been renowned for being a major cultural and educational hub in the country.

Russian paratroopers landed in the city to fight and take control of it early Thursday, with intense shelling.

Three men stand in the rubble in Zhytomyr on March 02, 2022, following a Russian bombing the day before. (AFP)

More than one million people have fled Ukraine to seek refuge in neighboring countries since last week, the United Nations reported on Thursday, adding that the number could increase to four million.

“I am against war. I am against Putin,” said Maria P.

“One of my old classmates went by bicycle from Kyiv to Lviv, which is around 10 hours by car, so I don’t even know how much time it took for her to go there by bicycle but she got there and she managed to cross the border to go to Poland and eventually, Germany. I’ve been watching her stories [on Instagram] from the shelter and in the conditions they are in right now and bombed cities,” said Maria S. “I feel like the people abroad are panicking more than them. I never thought that people could be that brave. They [Ukrainian people] never stop trying. They never stop believing.”

“Everyone has been extremely brave.”

Tensions rise between Russians and Ukrainians

Many Ukrainians took to social media over the past week to express their fear and disappointment over the Russian invasion and the state of their country, but this has since caused tensions to rise between Russians and Ukrainians.

“For us, Ukrainians, our normal life stopped last Thursday at 5 in the morning with the first Russian airstrike,” Olga said, adding that she was disappointed by many of her Russian friends who were posting videos of themselves having fun and partying on social media while all the Ukrainians they knew were grappling with fear and guilt, trying to help their families back home in any way possible.

“Some of my Russian friends are sincerely sorry about what’s been happening in Ukraine. Some others I used to regularly chat with before suddenly started to avoid me, or if they can’t [avoid me], they pretend like nothing is happening,” she said, adding that some of her Russian friends and relatives living in Russia had not texted her since the beginning of the invasion.

“They didn’t check if I’m OK or if [my family] are safe. This silence for me is also an answer.”

Maria P., 32, told Al Arabiya English that she felt a little tension with her Russian expat friends.

“The Russian invasion has caused some tension between me and some of my Russian expat friends. But the majority of my Russian friends are against the Russian regime and the war,” said Maria P.

Anna said that Russia has been waging an “informational” war by managing to “isolate a lot of people from reality and pin them against us [Ukrainians].”

“Russians who live abroad, they understand what happened and that people should not suffer. Even some Russians living in Russia can’t seem to understand why their government took this step and they feel sorry as we are connected by families and realities. But I can’t understand why some Russians wish us dead and are in favor of the war,” she said.

“Propaganda and Russian TV works well. On the third day of the Russian invasion, Russian TV showed that there were no victims from their army. Can you imagine? And who did they send to fight us? Young men, military students,” added Anna.

“I want Russian people to understand that a game of politics can never make up for the cost of the lives that are lost.”


“I am incredibly proud of our president. If it was not for him, we would lose on the first day,” said Maria S.

“I am not against Russia. I am against the people who support the conflict, regardless of their nationalities,” she added. “They [Russian army] are physically bringing their military technique and military planes, they are shooting our civilians, [destroying] our houses, ruining our childhood memories.”

“Thankfully, all my friends are against what is happening and they are doing their best to help and spread the news,” Maria S. explained. “Right now, we have a strong army and united people despite being under attack, me and my friends from all parts of the world are trying to sort out logistics for those who are in need. No one is asking for money, people giving accommodation, transfer and food for free.”

Throughout 2021 and the beginning of 2022, Russia’s military buildup on its shared border with Ukraine had escalated tensions between the two countries and tremendously affected their bilateral relations.

Ukrainian law enforcement officers take part in special tactical training exercises held by police, the National Guard and security services at the Kalanchak training ground in the Kherson region, Ukraine, on February 12, 2022. (Reuters)

Many countries have acted in solidarity, imposing tough sanctions on Russia and denouncing it over its invasion of Ukraine.

The UN General Assembly on Wednesday overwhelmingly voted to reprimand Russia over the invasion and demanded that it stop fighting and withdraw its military forces, aiming to diplomatically isolate Russia at the world body, Reuters reported.

Moscow has dealt with unprecedented international backlash over the past few days, especially from the West, whose sanctions have crippled Russia’s economy, since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is the biggest assault on a European state since the Second World War.